The 12 days of GCHQ quizmas: test your brain power with these daily puzzles

'The pursuit of happiness isn't all it's cracked up to be'

This article was taken from the April 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online.

ADVERTISEMENT

Aristotle claimed that "happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence." And for good reason. Scientists are only now beginning to catch up with Aristotle's early observations about human wellbeing, with recent discoveries pointing to the benefits of positive feelings: they motivate us to pursue goals, broaden our scope of attention, buffer against the effects of stress and even stave off illness. Further benefits of experiencing and promoting feelings centred on the wellbeing of others, such as compassion and gratitude, demonstrate robust benefits for our social relationships and even neural health. So it seems, for all intents and purposes, we should want to feel happiness and its related varieties of positivity, correct?

Not so fast. Although critical, this wave of interest in positive psychology has to date neglected another important possibility regarding positive emotion -- that it may, under certain conditions, be maladaptive. Indeed, some recent work has argued that happiness is not always good. One example includes experiencing happiness out of balance, or to an extreme degree.

Read more

New 'happiness equation' links cheerfulness with equality

ByMatthew Reynolds

Aristotelian definitions of emotional health argue that happiness has benefits up to a moderate degree, but can incur costs when experienced too intensely. For example, heightened positive feelings may lead us to feel less inhibited and more likely to explore new possibilities and take risks. Take this function of happiness to the extreme: adults experiencing heightened positive emotion have been shown to engage more in riskier behaviours and tend to disregard threats, including excessive alcohol consumption, binge eating, sexual promiscuity and drug use. So it seems that happiness is best experienced in moderation -- not too little, but also not too much.

Another line of work suggests that happiness -- and related positive emotions -- may not be suited to every situation. Our emotions serve important functions. Anger mobilises us to overcome obstacles; fear alerts us to threats; and sadness signals loss.

Happiness helps us to pursue and attain important goals, as well as facilitating co-operative and collaborative behaviours.

ADVERTISEMENT

Read more

Denmark is once again the happiest country in the world

ByK.G Orphanides

Illuminating work by Maya Tamir, a psychologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, found that people in a happy mood performed worse than people in an angry mood when engaging in a competitive computer-game task. Furthermore, individuals who self-report happiness in inappropriate contexts -- such as watching a film of the death of someone -- are at greater risk for the subsequent development of clinically significant mood disorders. In sum, happiness has a time and a place, and is not always suited for every situation.

Recent work has also argued that happiness should not always be desired. In fact, striving for happiness may actually cause more harm than good. This paradoxical effect is explained by psychologist Iris Mauss, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who shows that the more that people strive for happiness, the more likely they will set a high standard for happiness that will result in disappointment when it is not met.

ADVERTISEMENT

These findings demonstrate that the pursuit of happiness can actually have negative effects on individual wellbeing.

So where does this leave us? In some ways, these findings are not so surprising after all. We know that there are usually two sides to every story for most experiences in life. By opening ourselves to seeing another potential side of happiness -- and understanding it has both benefits and at times negative consequences -- we position ourselves to understand it more deeply and learn how to harness it effectively to promote healthier and more balanced lives. Indeed, the field is now ripe to consider not just the benefits but also the costs of positive emotion.

June Gruber is a professor and psychologist at Yale University @junegruber